NICHOLAS KRISTOF can’t make up his mind about who’s more dangerous: al Qaeda or gun-toting Americans. Kristof recently wrote two columns on the dangers of nuclear proliferation, his conclusion being that we are now more vulnerable to nuclear attack than ever before. In his August 11 column, Kristof speculated that, if a 10-kiloton nuclear device exploded in Times Square, “it would vaporize or destroy the theater district, Madison Square Garden . . . the United Nations,” and so on. He concluded that the casualty figure would be approximately 500,000 dead, and that the likelihood of this occurring in the next 10 years is somewhere between 20 percent (his guess) and 50 percent (the guess of Harvard Professor Graham Allison, author of Nuclear Terrorism).

In Kristof’s August 14 follow-up column, he conceded that “President Clinton’s approach to North Korea wasn’t a great success, but at least North Korea didn’t add to its nuclear arsenal during his watch.” Yet Kristof seems to feel that the nuclear threat posed by rogue states North Korea and Iran, and terrorists like Osama bin Laden, is actually quite minimal when compared with a lapse in the assault weapons ban.